The first time I developed text art on a computer occurred when I worked at a company in the 1980s that had a central IBM computer system where every
workstation had green-screen monitors
(green dot-matrix lettering on a black background). I wanted to create a new logon screen showing the company logo (an
old sailing ship riding on ocean waves surrounded by a circle) to replace the default IBM Sign On screen. Working within the
limitations of a monospaced 24x80 grid, I used different combinations of keyboard characters to achieve the many curves in the logo image. After my
logo screen was implemented it was a joy to walk around our offices in Boston, Washington, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore and see my
artwork displayed on every screen! (Sorry I didn't save an example of this.)

I had no idea that what I was doing had a following or even a name, but I discovered there were groups of people who had been creating text art
regularly for years and posting it to bulletin-boards (before the World‑Wide‑Web there were these dial-up shared blogs known as "bulletin
boards") under the name ASCII Art. Even though the computer world
has become much more graphical, ASCII Art has had a loyal
following and new people are discovering it all the time. As proof of its popularity, I have seen on statistics for my website that "ascii art" is a frequently used
search phrase that brings people to my site, which certainly motivates me to keep this page current.

I consider myself more of an enthusiast than a creative artist, so at the present time my personal contribution to the
ASCII Art world is
primarily to provide access to the works and resources of others with this webpage. I do 'doodle and dabble' a bit so maybe if I find the time I will
create some more of my own and post it. In the meantime, the artwork on this page is all ASCII Art.

I became fascinated with ASCII Art when I first saw Bob
Allison's work on his Scarecrow pages (the link goes to
an archive since his website is gone), some of which I have collected below. Bob, who was the moderator of the newsgroup rec.arts.ascii, had a website named BOBAWORLD that was so elaborate (here's a site map) that at first I suspected that Bob Allison was not an actual person but a composite of many
people. His site, which ceased to exist in 1996, had many fascinating sections including Uncle Bob's Kids' Page (wonderful G-rated page),
Spider's Pick of the Day (links to cool websites), The Michael Jordan Page (I believe Bob was from Chicago), The Web Masters'
Page (great help with web-authoring, I have a link to a copy of this on my Online Tips page), a Beatles page, and of course the Scarecrow pages.

"People ask me, 'How did I end up moderating rec.arts.ascii, maintaining the ASCII ART FAQ,
tending the Scarecrow's FTP site, keeping the Scarecrow's ASCII Art Archives, running the
Scarecrow's ASCII Art WWW Link?'
The answer is, it just sort of happened. Since I liked it and collected it, and there was no
big collections of it, I just formatted my edited collection, added comments, put a logo on it
and offered it to the Net. I wasn't prepared for the response. I got bombarded with requests.
After that, I made a FAQ, again because there wasn't one. Then came the rec.arts.ascii, the
FTP site, and the WWW site." -- Bob Allison

There are archived versions of many of these pages around the Internet. You can find them by searching on "BOBAWORLD" or
"Bob Allison" or "Scarecrow" but you will also find many links to to Bob's now defunct sites. Bob's reply to my email asking
him why he took it down was, not surprisingly, "It got too big."

Generally, ASCII Art is presented on a webpage bracketed by the <PRE> ... </PRE> tags, which applies the
fixed-width font setting in your browser and turns off word wrap. From a viewer perspective, if you don't like the way it
looks in your browser try different monospaced fonts. Thanks to computers, text art is a very trial-and-error
process. In the early days, when output could only be printed, I am sure it was much less elaborate, and the artists may
have settled for less, but now you can just make the most miniscule modifications until you get it exactly that way you
want, especially when working with greyscale and curves.

There is a variety of software to help produce text art, some that will convert an image file to an ASCII layout, which can
be very helpful in getting started (see b'ger's
tutorial
link for a good description of this), but some say that using software to convert input is not "art", that it is only
a conversion. Well, all artists use tools, and some tools are more sophisticated than others. We are already using computers
instead of typewriters. Would these same critics not accept electronic music as art? FIGlet is a program that will convert a word or phrase into different fonts with larger letters made up of individual
ASCII characters, like the ones I used in the titles on this page. JavE is a
popular ASCII editor where you work in a grid (purists will criticize it for doing much of the creative work for
you). There are many others, some of the older ones even DOS-based, but I have only used these.

ASCII drawings are frequently used in "signatures" that appear at the end of emails and newsgroup postings. Most email software can be set to
automatically include signatures as part of the compose process. Years ago, if you received email from me or read something I posted, you may have seen
some of the signatures I used. One of my favorites was when I had my name spelled out like this. You can see it better if you get back a little from
your screen and sort of take your eyes out of focus. My name is outlined with the characters you see. I used the parentheses characters because I could
not be sure what font the viewer would be using (I guess macros get around this) and I found that in most fonts, both variable-width and
monospaced, a single parenthesis ( and a single space _ take up the same width.

In ASCII Art some prefer the background to be dark and the text to be white, so I am giving you the option to see it both ways here.